Marcel Lecomte

Marcel Lecomte (September 25, 1900, Saint-Gilles (Brussels) - November 19, 1966, Brussels) was a Belgian writer, member of the Belgian surrealist movement. In 1918 he was introduced to dadaism and Eastern philosophy by Clément Pansaers. He also started to study literature and philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles that year, but he left the studies in 1920. Between 1934 and 1945 he was a teacher at a secondary school, since then he was able to make a living by writing (especially to newspapers); from 1958 he also worked as a counsellor for the Brussels´ Museum of Art.

In 1924 he founded a group named Correspondance with Paul Nougé and Camille Goemans from which he was excommunicated the following year; however, they became close again thanks to common interest in surrealism. Yet he was not a strict surrealist, being more interested in the metaphysics of the dailiness.

"Even though Lecomte – in a seemingly Breton-ish way – reads reality as a net of mysterious signs as surrealists do, he (unlike the author of Nadja) doesn't look for an apparition of unknown essence or decisive, world-changing (and radically new) truth behind it. The illusion of hidden finality which voids the facts of their substance for the benefit of eternal future revelation of their true meaning is a trap into which Lecomte did not let himself be lured. All the significance of disturbing signals his exacerbated receptivness caught from a look from an unknown woman, from the genius loci of certain places or simply the silhouettes of the passers-by, all that becomes one with the intensive experience, it completes itself in situ and at that actual moment. This significance is further enriched only by comments and thoughts by the poet. The miracle is not about escaping our closeness in time, but in a paradoxical opening of the freedom's space within a moment and in grasping this space." (Petr Král, 1996, in afterword to Marble tastes best when cold, an anthology of Belgian surrealism, page 205. Used by permission of P. Král.)